A crash recovery scheme for a hybrid mapping FTL in nand flash storage devices

Abstract

An FTL (flash translation layer), which most flash storage devices are equipped with, needs to guarantee the consistency of modified metadata from a sudden power failure. This crash recovery scheme significantly affects the writing performance of a flash storage device during its normal operation, as well as its reliability and recovery performance; therefore, it is desirable to make the crash recovery scheme efficient. Despite the practical importance of a crash recovery scheme in an FTL, few works exist that deal with the crash recovery issue in FTL in a comprehensive manner. This study proposed a novel crash recovery scheme called FastCheck for a hybrid mapping FTL called Fully Associative Sector Translation (FAST). FastCheck can efficiently secure the newly generated address-mapping information using periodic checkpoints, and at the same time, leverages the characteristics of an FAST FTL, where the log blocks in a log area are used in a round-robin way. Thus, it provides two major advantages over the existing FTL recovery schemes: one is having a low logging overhead during normal operations in the FTL and the other to have a fast recovery time in an environment where the log provisioning rate is relatively high, e.g., over 20%, and the flash memory capacity is very large, e.g., 32 GB or 64 GB.